


Song

by Trouvaille



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Violence, Bombing, Gen, One Word Prompts, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 08:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trouvaille/pseuds/Trouvaille
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All things truly wicked start from innocence."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Song

Jallal was just shy of fourteen years, his first week in the city of Cairo. He hadn’t yet learned the side streets, so he made his way along the boulevards, from square to square, careful not to touch the hot metal of the automobiles as he dodged traffic in the shadows of the city buildings.

Jallal passes through the crowd, the streets bustling with diplomats sweating through their cotton suits. In the center of the square by a fountain a nervous, bearded man was cranking a chime organ that played a lilting rendition of a Brahms waltz.

A harried-looking Englishman walked into the boy and kept going, wiping his brow with a silk handkerchief. Jallal passed a row of bright, partisan flags tied to the fence of the embassy. He crossed the square and watched as the Englishman opened the door to his automobile.

There was a quiet whoosh, a sharp intake of breath, a moment of quiet before the world was rent in two. The car erupted in fire as three hundred pounds of explosive hidden in the undercarriage was detonated. The bomb had been set on a timer, but the oppressive heat caused it to detonate early. It was a carefully-laid trap, setting off a chain reaction of charges throughout the square. The blasts shook the ground like an earthquake, rattling the street. The force knocked Jallal off his feet. He scrambled up, winded, ears ringing with a high, keening whine.

The fountain exploded behind him, throwing him forward into the side of a municipal building.

He blinked back into awareness, seconds, hours later, he didn’t know. He was on his back, blood staining his face, his hands. He tried to get up, but his body wouldn’t obey.

People started to emerge from the buildings. Some joined the crowd, trampling the fallen as they fled, screaming disbelief and fear. Cowards, Jallal thought, swallowing the copper taste in his mouth, the waltz ringing in his head.

He reached inadvertently for the hand of a woman sprawled beside him. The arm was severed at the elbow, fingers curled up like a dead spider, her face pale, smoke rising from her smouldering hair. 

He didn’t scream for help or grab at the passersby, but laid in the bloody square, transfixed. There was something strangely beautiful in the way the scene reflected in the girl’s glassy eyes, how the blood gathered in crimson pools, clotted with sand and ash, threads from the bright nationalist flags drifting on the hot wind like feather down.

The smell of the blood turned sour in the heat, enough to make him gag. He turned his face from the scene. Blood poured into his eyes from a deep cut on his forehead, staining his vision crimson at the corners. Flies swarmed the wounded and dying in angry, buzzing clouds. 

He coughs, his throat sore, chest aching. The air was thick with the smell of death, the acrid smoke billowing from the blackened frames of the automobiles.

He recognized her as Anatolian, Turkish, by her checkered skirt, the dusty white scarf around her hair, the silent acceptance of a refugee, left over from the Great War. Where the others ran, the old woman walked among the victims, checking for signs of life. She didn’t speak, but took Jallal’s wrist, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, her hand coming back crimson. She looked into his eyes for a long moment while he struggled to focus.

Finally, she nodded. It took several attempts to drag the boy to his feet. The ground was slick with blood. He stumbled as she led him to her nearby basement apartment. It was dark and cool, lit by a single candle.

Jallal collapsed gratefully onto a rug and shut his eyes, overwhelmed with tiredness. The woman quickly shook him awake, shaking her head.

“Not sleep,” she warned in halting Arabic, and disappeared back up the steep staircase to the warzone above, returning some time later with two other wounded boys.

The woman cleaned and stitched the gash on Jallal’s forehead, humming the tune that had played in the square. She kept him awake for fifty long hours until he could speak without slurring his words. He watched as she tended to the others in the basement flat. One was badly burned on his face and back, the other moaned and cried and clutched his ribs for a day and a quarter before finally giving in to Death.

Jallal fell asleep in the quiet that followed.


End file.
